The present invention pertains to the art of typography, and more particularly to a method and apparatus for copy-fitting. Copy-fitting is the procedure used to measure the amount of space that a given amount of typewritten copy will occupy when set in type. It serves to determine, in advance, the correct type face, size and line width needed to fit copy to layout or layout to copy.
Gutenberg was credited with the invention of moveable type, ca. 1450 A.D. From that meager beginning of a single font of a single size, hundreds of additional type fonts have been introduced that range from extra condensed to extended, and from 4 points as the smallest to 240 points and larger. That's a long road from the meager beginning of a single type font of 30-point type which Gutenberg had.
In the early days, when a very few fonts of type were available, copy-fitting was no great problem. The procedure was to measure the length of the 26 letters in the alphabet, dividing the 26 by the measure to arrive at characters per pica. Using the characters per pica figure times the line length, one could arrive at the number of characters per line. But as the number of fonts increased, and with the fairly recent introduction of Photo-Typesetters with its range of from 4 points size to 96 points or even larger, the problem has become further compounded. With all the innovations of modern technology such as computer typesetting, photo-typesetters, etc., the only procedure available for copy-fitting calls for using the characters per pica of a given point size of a certain font to begin calculations. That printing could progress so far on the one hand and remain so stagnant on the other after approximately 527 years somewhat staggers the imagination.
The antiquated procedures available today require that the alphabet length be known for the point size of the particular font from which the copy-fitter wishes to set. With the wide range of sizes from 4 to 96 point type, and with the hundreds of fonts available, this entails maintaining thousands of alphabet lengths for effective copy-fitting.
Heretofore, it has been necessary to know the length of the alphabet from a particular font, in picas, of the point size being used, in order to determine the total number of characters required to fill a line of a certain length. The calculation would be as follows: consult listing for desired font to determine alphabet length of desired point size and solve the equations: ##EQU1## and characters per pica.times.line length=characters per line
The above calculations required several known factors to arrive at the solution of one unknown. If the result was unsatisfactory, the listing had to be reviewed and a new calculation made. Add to this the fact that information was seldom provided for capitals or small capitals, and it becomes evident that the process of copy-fitting has always been a tedious and time-consuming operation.